Memeorandum

December 08, 2010

Like Two Presidents In One

I found Obama's press conference this afternoon on the tax deal with Republicans absolutely fascinating. We were treated to two Obamas for the price of one (three Obamas, if you count yesterday's announcement; see previous post). The Great Question confronting him in the remainder of his first term was vividly clear...

Big Skip and...

One minute, he's reassuring progressives. We are good and they are evil. It's victims and hostage-takers, no less. Just be patient, our time will come, and accounts with the enemy will be settled. Next minute, he's rebuking the same progressives. Spare me your sanctimonious purism. It's un-American. We have good-faith differences of opinion. "This country was founded on compromise." Well, I suppose you could say these are mere differences of emphasis, but that is not how they strike me. They suggest radically different approaches to politics, and here is the crux of the problem. Obama has been vacillating between the two since 2008--but never before, that I have seen, from the same podium within the space of five minutes.

One day we will find out who we elected. David Kurtz thinks that day arrived, but I say tomorrow is another day and another Obama.

Comments

A few days ago I quoted someone re Wikileaks:

"Something else to note.

"Someone with access to hundreds of thousands of classified communications and with the ability to move them without detection must have exceptionally high security clearance. He or she must be on the far upper end of the ladder. Why would individuals like that risk their careers, possibly their lives, just to embarrass the US, presumably their own country?

"Whistleblowers tend to be people who obey the call of their conscience and moral codes to expose crimes and injustices committed. But there is nothing of the sort in this “leak”.

FWIW, Charlie is now suggesting an inside job. Questions is: who? I haven't seen a better suggestion yet.

Back then, know nothings here were also suggesting that Assange couldn't be prosecuted under the Espionage Act and couldn't be extradited anyway. Well, neither eventuality has come to pass--yet--but I did also suggest that Assange should be careful about his travel plans. Among other persons commenting on these issues, we now have Gabe Schoenfeld today at the WSJ:

Can the U.S. Bring Assange to Justice?
To convict under the Espionage Act, a trial must prove bad faith on the part of the accused. With WikiLeaks, that's easy.

TM- I agree, tomorrow is another day another Obama. While he is an Alinsky Lefty, he ia first and foremost a narcissist of the highest order, and will do whatever he thinks best for BarryO AT THAT MOMENT. Other than self-love, he has no real convictions. So tomorrow is another day, another Obama.

TM- I agree, tomorrow is another day another Obama. While he is an Alinsky Lefty, he ia first and foremost a narcissist of the highest order, and will do whatever he thinks best for BarryO AT THAT MOMENT. Other than self-love, he has no real convictions. So tomorrow is another day, another Obama.

Bradley Manning had a Top Secret/SCI clearance. SCI being Sensitive Compartmented Information. Its about as high as you can get outside of SAP and Crypto. It doesn't have to be someone else with a higher clearance. What we should be concerned about is how he obtained this clearance and what kind of background check was conducted. Without sounding homophobic, did his homosexuality check out during background and what were the metrics used to discount that as a security risk. And yes, despite DADT, it is very much considered if you are going to give a TS/SCI clearance and access to the "sensitive compartmented information" he was given.

This is just the lasted manifestation of Obama double speak. He's been saying since he got in office that he wanted to "work with Republicans" and turning around in the same speech and saying that all he wanted from them was to shut up and get out of the way.

Having a TS/SCI is far from the end of considerations that need to be taken into account. As I've said, I've paid little attention to the technicalities of the Wikileaks case. The data would need to be sifted to determine what types of compartments were involved, etc. It would appear to be worth the effort. If the leaked information cuts across different compartments the presumption might/should be that it comes either from multiple sources or from one source at a very much higher level than Manning.

"As with TS clearances, Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearances are assigned only after one has been through the rigors of a Single Scope Background Investigation and a special adjudication process for evaluating the investigation. SCI access, however, is assigned only in "compartments." See Compartmentalization (intelligence). These compartments are necessarily separated from each other with respect to organization, so an individual with access to one compartment will not necessarily have access to another.[citation needed] Each compartment may include its own additional special requirements and clearance process. An individual may be granted access, or read into to a compartment for an extended or only short period of time."

I dunno, Rob. He's spent his whole life telling different people what they want to hear. He's a flim-flam man and can't do anything else. So when he gets pushback from multiple directions, he freaks. Not surprising he'd try to address all his critics serially, in the same speech.

Incidentally I think the criticism from former supporters on the left bothers him more than not getting his favored policies enacted. It's his ego talking. To be held up as a hero and then rejected by these people is intolerable to him.

When a Shiite prayer leader blames earthquakes in Iran on immodestly dressed and promiscuous women, neocons like Michael Ledeen snicker.

When a prominent ultra-orthodox Israeli spiritual and political leader agrees with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh that the fire destroying Israel’s Carmel Forest is a punishment from God, there’s silence.

Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, who remains a prominent spiritual and political leader of the Shas party, and Palestinian Prime Minister elect Haniyeh agree that the Deity has been venting His fury by means of the destructive blaze in Israel, but disagree about why.

The German press agency DPA, via Haaretz, reports that Haniyeh, during emergency prayers for rain held in Gaza on Sunday, stated that “those fires are divine strikes for what they [Israel] did.” According to the Jerusalem Post, Haniyeh told Reuters during a recorded interview: “These are plagues from God” and “Allah is punishing them [the Israelis] from a place they did not expect it.”

After Hamas’s overwhelming electoral victory on January 25, 2006 in the Palestinian parliamentary election, Haniyeh was chosen to be the Palestinian Prime Minister and he was sworn in on March 29, 2006. The U.S. then severed all contact with Hamas-led Palestinian government. Israel has refused to accord any political legitimacy to Hamas.

Rabbi Yosef, on the other hand, blames Israelis’ religious laxity–particularly their failure to properly observe the sabbath–for arousing Divine wrath, according to the Israeli news site Y-Net:

ttorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. acknowledged this week that there were problems with the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that says the unauthorized possession and dissemination of information related to national defense is illegal. But he also hinted that prosecutors were looking at other statutes with regard to Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

“I don’t want to get into specifics here, but people would have a misimpression if the only statute you think that we are looking at is the Espionage Act,” Mr. Holder said Monday at a news conference. “That is certainly something that might play a role, but there are other statutes, other tools that we have at our disposal.”(snip)

Prosecutors have used the Espionage Act to convict officials who leaked classified information. They have never successfully convicted any leak recipient who then passed the information along, however, and the Justice Department has never tried to prosecute a journalist —which Mr. Assange portrays himself as being — under either a Republican or a Democratic administration.

DoT has said, and I agree the problems with the Espionage Act could have been resolved months ago had the administration proposed a new law to deal with such stuff after the first fairly innocuous leak occurred with promises of more to come. But it didn't. It just sat on its proverbial thumbs...or asses.

I hasten to add, I'm not prejudging the source of the Wikileaks. What I AM suggesting is that is that no one should accept the current narrative unquestioningly. There are legitimate questions to be asked and the answers at this point are not totally obvious.

The problem with the President's clumsy first attempt at triangulation is that geometry was obviously a bridge too far in his indoctrination process. We're going to be greatly entertained by his attempts to sell Obama - A Great Floor Wax and A Delicious Desert Topping because, as MarkO notes, he's just not that smart - and he's not an exceptionally good liar.

The standard clearance for anyone who works in a secure facility is TS/SCI. (Has to be: otherwise nobody would be able to talk.) Even a lowly spec4 analyst has a clearance equal to everything in the data dump (which didn't include specially compartmented stuff, because it wouldn't be in the database).

In this case, I suspect the documents are almost exclusively "Secret" or lower (since TS triggers additional security, and the standard SIPRNET encryption is not sufficient). So the standard clearance for an intel guy is in fact one level higher than required.

Rick Ballard at 11:12-- exactly right, and it will be entertaining. having a flailing completely moronic git as CEO of the Fed Gov't is bad for the country for the next 2 years, but it is dramatically better than a smart Alinskyite president.

Cecil, from the little attention I've paid to the content, I would tend to agree with what you've written. One problem is that we've seen a relatively small amount of what is alleged to be out there. To this point, I agree that much of this could be accessed by a lower level analyst. My questions at this point would be re the scope: ME and Argentina? IMO, a "lowly spec4 anayst" would be unlikely to have a need to know spanning such disparate areas, which leads back to Charlie's question: is our security really inept or did someone with broader need to know get involved?

Bottom line, it's worth wondering whether this leak may have been more complex that initial reports wish us to believe. Inquiring minds should be wondering.

Melinda:
It's an excellent article and I think the dems are spending way too much time in the state of denial. I think it will finally sink in when they reconvene in January.Obama gets it now,which is why he comes across as surly,angry and combative.

OT-- Glenn Reynolds has been on this for a couple of years and now Jim Pethokoukis highlights in Reuters-- The State Pension Bomb. All states but 2 have defined benefits plans. All states have a problem but as usual the deep blue states are without hope of a solution , Calif. Ill. NJ Ma. etc. There will not be any federal bailout; solution -- modify the bankruptcy code to allow sovereign state reorganization which will allow the states to disavow the corrupt pension deals in union contracts. State Dem legislators will stick it to the unions RETIREES in order to save their own political necks. This will be the next big issue, and it is a bad one for the Dems politically.

Hostages were the bodies of americans hled for political jobd like Pres and all those govt jobs dems can have; its the money dems claim and control like harvard claiming all govt jobs and money as their own.O got his job and gives away fed jobs and money with those hostages.Congressmen dont want to be hostages so dems get what they want and they release some hostages.Scam like O.

. . . which leads back to Charlie's question: is our security really inept or did someone with broader need to know get involved?

They've already admitted the diplo database was out there (and nobody in a field SCIF has any possible need to know any of that stuff), so it's "really inept" even if somebody else were involved. Manning's continued access after demotion and assorted other issues is another bit of glaring ineptitude, so I don't think there's any doubt on that score. Might also be other involvement, but Occam's Razor would argue against assuming it.

I knew of Manning's problems and that is inept. I didn't know that the diplo database is simply "out there." That, too, is bizarrely inept. I'm open to various explanations, including the semi-official one. I'm also open to the notion that these are selective leaks--as, I think, Susan Abulhawa has argued fairly convincingly. There are various ways to account for what appears to be selectivity in the leaks--selectivity based on the source(s), based in the Wikileaks organizations, etc. Cui bono? is always a worthwhile question to ask--not just, who is embarrassed?

I'm also open to the notion that these are selective leaks--as, I think, Susan Abulhawa has argued fairly convincingly.

I rather doubt they kept a voluminous database for selective leaking, and the stuff that's been made public is intensely embarassing to DoS, if nobody else, so that makes it doubly dubious. There also isn't any evidence to suggest that; certainly not in those maunderings by Abulhawa (talk about bizarre). And sorry, but I have no interest in delving into the fever swamps of her delusions.

She Who Is Perfect In All Ways teaches computer/network security at a major university, and in her class this semester is a retired Army officer who had a lot of hands on experience on precisely this area. His claim is that yes, the cable database is just "out there" and basically anyone with a "Secret" clearance can get it. The various access websites and databases are supposed to be password protected but frequently aren't. He thought it completely plausible that Manning could have gathered all this data on his own, claiming (the officer) could easily have done the same without any better clearance.

One of the problems is the tendency to mark everything "Secret" (or better) which means that if you want to get anything done, everyone must have access to the "Secret" network with the secondary result that security for that isn't rigorously enforced. That's an aspect of over-classification I don't see mentioned very often.

P.S. You see the opposite with drone datalinks. They're unencrypted so that it's easy for the grunts on the ground to get access, rather than redtaping them with key distribution. It's easy to make pronouncement about what should be done, a lot harder to make it work in the field.

This is like that argument that surfaced in the 80s, that the Soviets had fixed the data
we received from them, leading to an unneccesarily large defense budget, denial is
wider than the Amazon isn't it,

One of the realities about President Obama is the degree to which he is a singular politician, a self-contained person who rose to power largely on the strength of his own intelligence, guile and self-confidence. He has always charted his own course - one that sometimes defied the customary or approved path - relying on himself and his own instincts rather than on others.

Wow. Who knew you could cram the first four stages of grief--disbelief, anger, denial and bargaining--into a 24 hour hews cycle single speech? Must be further evidence of Barry's superior intellect and instinct.

Wikileaks data set is too broad for just one person with a SCI clearance, at least at this level. If there is only one operative, it must be someone else and at a much higher level to be able to acquire it though SCI--this would require multiple SCI's for that one operative in fact. If the leak was in some operation crypto/comm/collection unit, it would have to be WAY up. This would not be a case of some low level comms operator just reading what they were sending. It does not work that way.

True, a lot of this does not seem at the SCI level, but the a lot of these State cables and some of the DoD stuff would be.

If it is one person my guess is that he is political or, perhaps an executive pro high level career executive in one of the agencies (though I would tend to discount this latter case as being to amateurish and risky.)

BTW, TS and Sci are really not that comparable, and SCI is not "the next step". SCI is just a generic terms for many more levels that are qualified on a "compartmental" level.

Odd are that this is a professional feeder/intel operation. The question is who is driving it and why. It need not be Americans running it BTW, and it could be private too.

We will get a better idea about its real nature form how this goes from here. If it wound down, how so? It their transference to another channel? Has this been s setup for something other than leaks and embarrassment (a false flag op; false Intel release). Does something worse comes out? Have we seen results elsewhere that would make of this a sort shot across the bow?

It looks private to me, but run by pros, or former pros with connections still. Could be Soros--it is certainly not out of the question. It is not being terminated right for it to be run by a foreign power, it seems to me, but maybe that is part of the game.

That is not to say that Obama and Co. might not be duped into a feeder operation thinking that they ran it and not understanding the broader game.

Not only Glenn Reynolds but Dick Morris (and yr. mst. obt. svt. &c. &c.) have been on this issue for some time. The best and most comprehensive discussion of the issues involved--constitutional and otherwise--is a Weekly Standard article by a lawyer named David Skeel.

Just checking in for a minute, but I want to make sure anduril's concerns are sufficeintly clear.
There almost certainly has to be someone higher than Manning and it almost certainly has to be a disloyal Jew, as if there were any other kind.

squaredance, you make some good points, as does AOG. This is why I say "Cui bono?" is a sensible line of inquiry.

those maunderings by Abulhawa

Abulhawa makes a number of quite legitimate points, all of which point toward the probability of selective leaks. These two are pretty hard to argue with--which is why Cecil issued a standard preemptive refusal to discuss:

You can’t even find Vice President Joe Biden’s name in the keyword search even though Israel’s announcement of the construction of more illegal Jewish-only settlements in East Jerusalem on the eve of Biden’s visit to Tel Aviv amounted to an epic public spanking of Obama. Subsequent statements from the White House were as harsh as America ever dares to be with Israel, although they did not approach Obama’s reported ire over the matter. Thus far, there is not a single cable on the matter.

This was a huge story at the time, so the fact that a lot of the leaked material is ME in orientation but this story doesn't get a mention certainly seems odd.

If you search cables originating in Dubai, all you’ll find are those denouncing and accusing Iran in titles like “Arab states scorn ‘evil’ Iran”, “AbuDhabi favors action to prevent nuclear Iran”, or “Emiratis fret over Iranian meddling”. This is quite amazing considering that the biggest diplomatic crisis this year occurred after a senior Hamas leader was assassinated in Dubai. The evidence and the world’s collective finger pointed at the Mossad and several diplomatic fallouts ensued when it was confirmed that Israel had forged foreign passports of the hitmen. And yet, there is not a word about this in any of the cables released so far. Instead, everything referencing the UAE or originating from Dubai only discusses “evil Iran”, much like the cables referencing Gen. Petraeus.

Could anything be more apparent than the fact that Wikileaks is NOT providing us a random sampling of cables originating in Dubai? Any random selection would have been bound to mention this story. So, the question is: if the selection of Dubai cables was NOT random, what were the selection criteria?

Krauthammer thinks Obama is the big victor in this week's controversial tax deal. At least from a 'liberal perspective.'

As Krauthammer tells it, the professional left actually has no idea what's actually going on:

I think the professional left misunderstands the president and what he's achieved...look, in the deal with McConnell over the tax cuts he won. He just got the left to agree to a near trillion dollar, a $900 billion second stimulus. All of it paid by Chinese money we borrow. None of it will be paid for, blowing a huge hole in the debt. And he did this without even calling it a stimulus....which will be dispensed in the next two years, which happen to be the two years in the run-up to Obama's reelection.

[...]

If his presidency ended today he'd be remembered as a President who revolutionized American health care and essentially nationalized 1/6 of the American economy. That's a big achievement if you're a liberal.

An alternative explanation. Relations with Isreal are sensitive in this country, and there is a perceived desire to leak about them. Wouldn't touch conversations with the Isrealis be culled from the rather too available database the wikileaks material comes from?

Personally, I think a great thriller plot would be salting one of these kind of data dumps with the periodic false document to create world chaos.

Check Out Janet Tavakoli's Presentation On Why Housing Finance Was Always "Fraud As A Business Model"

CDOs and CDOs squared were just "fraud to cover-up fraud," according to Janet Tavakoli of Tavakoli Structured Finance.
In this presentation made today to the Federal Housing Finance Agency Supervision Summit, Tavakoli explains individuals at firms making mortgage backed securities knew the loans they were securitizing were fraudulent.

Tavakoli walks through all the parties involved, and claims the banks held the U.S. government hostage as the market started to collapse, resulting in the bailout scenario. She places the blame for this scenario on the shoulders of banks that made fraudulent loans.

It's a concise walk through of the market collapse some blame for the Great Recession.

The "hostage" talking point was surely scripted (Rush had a great montage of that), but I don't think the rift with the "progressives" is fake. The end of that press conference yesterday had a whining Obama just about accusing St. FDR of the same ulterior motives as he has himself re: the health care nose in the tent. This isn't often done out in the open, and it seems obvious that the loss of Messiah status is getting to Obama.

Spare me your sanctimonious purism. It's un-American. We have good-faith differences of opinion. "This country was founded on compromise."

The next sentence after that quote was, "I couldn't go through the front door in this country's founding." That's not a remarkably bad sentence by the low standards of Obamatory (did the founding have a front door?), but it lends itself to two interpretations: either Obama felt the need to remind his audience of his race, or the founding compromise to which he referred, during the post-partisan "rebuke of the progressives" part of the speech, was the compromise between slavers and anti-slavers.

as MarkO notes, he's just not that smart

Telling a Russian gangster his girlfriend is smokin' hot and asking if they're in an open relationship is not that smart. Obama's a bonehead.

Wouldn't that have depended on the State he was in as well as whether he was a free or slave black? And I suppose the many indentured whites wouldn't have been allowed in the front door either. I'm not about to dispute the serious injustices committed against blacks as a race, but Obama clearly prefers dealing in card board cut out "realities" rather than the often messy complexities of reality as it actually is.

Let’s review the evidence. President Obama received from Gordon Brown a pen-holder made from the timbers of a Royal Navy anti-slavery vessel, and reciprocated with DVDs. He silkily downgraded the UK from “our closest ally” to “one of our allies”. He gave the Queen an iPod full of his own speeches. He used the Louisiana oil spill to attack an imaginary company called “British Petroleum” (it has been BP for the past decade, ever since the merger with Amoco gave it as many American as British shareholders). He sent a bust of Winston Churchill back to the British Embassy. He managed, on his visit to West Africa, to refer to the struggle for independence, but not to the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery. He has refused to acknowledge our presence in Afghanistan in any major speech. He has even come dangerously close to backing Peronist Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands. There’s no getting away from it: Barack Obama doesn’t much like Limeys.

FWIW, Charlie is now suggesting an inside job. Questions is: who? I haven't seen a better suggestion yet.

Anduril, I suggested an inside job was one of two possibilities. From the comments, and from email and messages from my own friends in the intelligence community, I'm assured that, no, SIPRnet really is that open and operations controls really are that lax. Thus an insider isn't actually a necessary condition.

Bradley Manning had a Top Secret/SCI clearance. SCI being Sensitive Compartmented Information.

JiB, can you cite a source for that? None of the stuff that's been released has been classified any higher than SECRET and none of it has been SI or special channels. And I've known plenty of operators/analysts at the Division or Corps level who just has a SECRET.

I haven't been following this discussion, but isn't it possible that he did indeed have the clearance but that having that clearance wasn't necessary for him to get access to this stuff?

I have no idea how the State Department people classify things, but from a military standpoint most of this material would be "confidential," and everybody and his tuna can get at confidential material.

What continues to astound me is that the Secretary of State who presided over this huge national embarrassment has not been summoned to the congress to account for how the hell it happened and what is being done about it.

Folks, for the record, I think the ongoing discussion and evidence really does argue for explanation one: "yes they really are that dumb and compartmentalization and operations did break down that thoroughly".

It does appear that Manning had enough time in service to make an EBI clearance plausible, but I still think it's unlikely and I'd like to confirm he had one before I speculated.

That is why--The State Dept doesn't care about how it happened and nothing is being done about it. Didn't DOD say they could have stopped it and didn't?--- IMO, no one in the current US government cares.

Said chainsaw was not in evidence last night. But then I'm not Sylvia.

But I admit it. Yesterday I broke the law and committed a mortal sin. All to see hit.

Before we met, I had a meeting in Santa Clara that ran over a bit. I tried to call hit to let him know I was running late, but it turns out that he gave me the wrong number.

So on the way to San Francisco from Santa Clara, I broke the law. I took his cell phone call and we chatted for many minutes. Please forgive me!!

The mortal sin was that we had a mediocre meal in San Francisco. That pretty hard to do, actually, and I accept full responsibility. There was a redeeming factor: the restaurant was a half block from hit's hotel, so the many beers did not overly impede our trudge back after dinner.

The dinner conversation, you ask? Wonderful. The three hours went by very quickly, much too quickly I'm afraid.